Some personal views on nanotechnology, science and science policy from Richard Jones

About Soft Machines

Soft Machines: nanotechnology and life, by Richard A.L. Jones

Soft Machines is a book about nanotechnology, published in the UK and the USA by Oxford University Press.

The book, intended for the general reader, explains why things behave differently at the nanoscale to the way they behave at familiar human scales, and why this means that nanotechnology may be more like biology than conventional engineering.

Like a knowledgeable host making dinner conversation, Jones moves from topic to topic with a stream of lively banter. ….By the end of the book, Jones’s vivid descriptions and diverse examples have made me a believer. He tells us again and again to look inside cells for inspiration, for methods and for raw materials when faced with this challenging new world.

Soft Machines is an informative and readable exploration of the nanoworld: length scales, energies, forces, the tools used in the exploration, the importance of Brownian motion and van der Waals (surface) forces, quantum effects and band structures, nanotubes and quantum dots, etc. There are educational and entertaining descriptions of technologies from cryo-transmission electron microscopy to CMOS. The discussion of the role of Brownian motion and entropy in self-assembly, and the role of self-assembly in producing nanoscale and larger structures, is particularly well done.

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Richard Jones is the author of Soft Machines: nanotechnology and life, a book about nanotechnology. For more details about the book, see here.
He is a Professor of Physics and the Pro-Vice Chancellor for Research and Innovation at the University of Sheffield, and a Council Member of EPSRC. The views expressed on this blog are written entirely in a personal capacity.